Data Science Stories

Amherst College, Fall 2023

Welcome! 🙂

The projects below were created by students at Amherst College as part of a final project for our STAT 231 Data Science course.

Scroll down to explore the students’ blog posts or use the navigation bar on the side to jump to a particular group!

Blog Posts 📝


yay soccer


Exploration of the Soccer World!


One of the best parts of every weekend is turning on the tv and putting on a soccer game. There are tons of them, but we focus the most on games in the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), and the Bundesliga (Germany). These are three of the five biggest soccer leagues in Europe and attract lots of fans every weekend.



Internet Explorers


Oil and Economics


The world runs on energy, and for the last 2 centuries, a major source of the worlds energy has been oil. Historically, it has been an incredibly profitable industry. Today, oil and gas provide 80% of American energy, and provide >12 million American jobs. A similar trend is followed globally, with few exceptions. As a result of the prominence of oil and gas within each nation-state’s energy consumption profile, it is a sought after commodity. Many conflicts both prior and current revolve around, or have implications relating to access to energy resources. A period specific example would be the most recent outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, beginning in February 2022. As a result of the re-kindling of this conflict, many European nations that were formerly served by Russian oil/gas had to find new sources of energy, as it was no longer an option to purchase from Russia given the nation’s encroachment upon Ukraine’s sovereignty.



yay data science


Sentiment Comparison Between Popular TV Shows


What makes a TV show popular? While that is a multifaceted question with no straightforward answer, we want to find similarities and differences between three vastly different and very successful TV shows (Gilmore Girls, Euphoria, South Park) to see what makes them so popular. To look into the “why,” we have done text and sentiment analysis of the scripts of these shows and contextualized these analyses with our own interpretations as to why these words and general sentiments might resonate with viewers. Having seen these shows, we are able to confirm whether the analyses accurately depict the essence and topics of the series. First, we had to webscrape these scripts and then we cleaned up the scripts and removed the stop words. We then performed the analyses to reach a conclusion about how and why such disparate TV shows are so appealing to the general public.



network mammoths


Exploring Artificial Intelligence and Programming: A Comprehensive Analysis of Developer Perspectives


In the world of coding, things are shaking up with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. From people just getting the hang of coding to the pros handling big projects, everyone has a different perspective on AI. In this blog project, we’re digging into the real thoughts of thousands of programmers across the United States at different career stages. Our goal is to use sentiment analysis to better understand the attitudes of programmers towards the use of AI tools in Stack Overflow. With the continuing rise of AI usage in the programming industry, it is important to understand how professional programmers feel about the impact of AI on their work.



moneymakers


Statistics Behind N.I.L.


What is N.I.L.? The ability to profit from one’s own Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL), became legal for college athletes on July 1, 2021. The rule change allows college athletes to monetize their own status and influence.

What is Our Objective? The rule change allowing players to monetize their NIL has greatly influenced college sports, namely football. College Football has long been a money-making machine for institutions across America. However, as the schools, athletics departments, and coaches reaped the benefits of their football teams’ successes, it was illegal for players to make profits. This all changed in July of 2021 with the legalization of NIL. The world of NIL has since led to massive controversy. Arguably the largest issue that has stemmed is the concern that people are no longer loyal to their team. The transfer portal represents an opportunity for teams to effectively bid for players. This effective bidding war includes money poured into it from school sponsors and fans. The focus in college football has seemingly shifted from an effort to develop one’s own players to an attempt to “buy” players from rival teams. But how important is NIL to team success? To what degree does NIL influence player transfer decisions?



potterwatch


Potterwatch


It is no secret that the Harry Potter books and movie franchise are vastly beloved: its world building and character development lauded as some of the best for children and young adults. The books are split into seven installments: “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone,” “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” The movies are divided similarly, only having two parts to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” instead of one. Seeking to see trends in character mention frequency and sentiment in the books and movies respectively, we created two visualizations.



data wranglers


Evaluating the Economics and Success of US Major Sports Teams


Professional sports economics is a controversial topic with various factors influencing team performance, financial success, and overall competitiveness within leagues. There have been many discussions throughout the years in which people argue that sports teams should be owned by the cities in which they reside instead of being privately owned in an attempt to make them more accessible to the general public, along with the viewpoint that professional athletes are being paid too handsomely. Generally, people want to know if there is a correlation between spending and team success. While one would think that if a team spends more on resources and players, they will win more, we believe many cases involving some of the notable franchises throughout history have shown us that this isn’t always true. There is also a prevailing narrative that the dominance of “big-market teams” in major cities like Los Angeles and New York is often attributed to their larger fan bases, extensive media markets, and lucrative sponsorship opportunities.



eea


Macroeconomic Trends Explorer


Knowing what influences a country’s development is a never-ending task in the field of macroeconomics. Expanding upon the work completed in the middle of the semester, our final assignment explores the macroeconomic patterns in many nations. However, this time, our focal point revolves around key indicators that shape the Human Development Index (HDI), including life expectancy at birth, expected and mean years of schooling, and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita. Through the use of unsupervised learning, we aim to cluster countries based on these HDI indicators, revealing trends and ideas beyond geographic borders. The main goal of our research is to predict the HDI category a certain nation may fall into, and potentially compare the results with the recognized HDI Rank list. We hope that this effort will help evaluate our model’s accuracy. We also hope to develop a predictive model for countries’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) using a combination of the HDI indicators. By dividing the data into training and testing sets, our method makes it possible to carefully assess the prediction accuracy.



Resources 📚